Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — Seniors who were threatened with the loss of their benefits if they did not trade
in their paper checks for Social Security benefits paid through a debit card or electronic deposit
might be getting a reprieve.

The Treasury Department has agreed to make it easier for them to request a waiver to the
electronic requirement, after a hearing held by Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate’s
Special Committee on Aging.

Millions of beneficiaries switched to an electronic payment with no trouble. But the Treasury
Department was spending an inordinate amount of resources pressuring the remaining 3 percent,
Nelson said. About 2.5 million beneficiaries receive paper checks.

“This group contains some of the most vulnerable and least tech-savvy of our seniors, and this
committee is going to stand up for them,” Nelson said in June. “It’s hard to understand the value
of getting them to switch.”

The Treasury Department already had said it would waive the electronic conversion for seniors
who were 90 years old as of May 1, 2011. But in a letter to Nelson last week, the department said
it will stop using threatening language in letters to beneficiaries who have not embraced
electronic access.

Advocates for seniors testified in June that there was no way to access the waiver form online.
And when a beneficiary tried to get one through the call center, the staff was trained to refuse to
send a waiver application at first. Instead, they tried to persuade the caller to agree to an
electronic payment.

Treasury reported granting roughly 3,000 automatic waivers based on age as of June, said Rebecca
Vallas, representing the National Consumer Law Center, National Senior Citizens Law Center and the
Senior Law Center. Yet, more than 300,000 Social Security beneficiaries are 92 or older, she
said.

The department also is supposed to grant waivers to people with a mental impairment or who live
in an area so remote that an electronic payment would hinder their access to benefits.

In last week’s letter, Alastair MacLennan Fitzpayne, Treasury’s assistant secretary for
legislative affairs, said that by Oct. 1, the agency would send out letters to seniors who qualify
for an age waiver.

Beneficiaries using paper checks no longer will receive letters warning: “Please act now as
Treasury will continue to monitor your noncompliance,” Fitzpayne promised.

Treasury has not agreed to expand the categories of people who are eligible for a waiver.